Chapter 8 - THE RACE AGAINST TIMEBack at the private medical suite, the monitors flickered erratically.
Audrey lay in bed, tossing restlessly as a high-pitched, rhythmic warning tone began to beep softly from the central patient monitor.
BEEP... BEEP... BEEP...
Two trauma nurses rushed into the room, their eyes widening in horror as they watched Audrey’s heart rate spike from seventy beats per minute to one hundred and forty in a matter of seconds.
"Her neurological vitals are crashing!" nurse Sarah yelled, tapping furiously at the bedside terminal. "She’s seizing! Administer anti-convulsants immediately!"
"We tried!" the second nurse shouted back, her voice shaking. "The automated injection port is locked by an external firewall override! Someone is hacking our medical servers remotely!"
At that exact moment, the private comms unit on the wall buzzed to life. Vincent’s voice blasted through the speaker, thick with panic and urgency.
"Sarah! Report! What’s happening in the suite?"
"Mr. Moretti!" Sarah screamed over the howling alarm tones. "Audrey is going into acute neurological shock! Her vitals are failing, and an unknown external malware has locked down all local medical controls! We can't administer treatment!"
Vincent felt the ground drop out from beneath him. Standing in the cold dockyard warehouse, his hands curled into white-knuckled fists.
"Kael!" Vincent roared, turning to his lead tech analyst. "The syndicate’s mainframe! Where is it hosted? Trace the decryption signal right now!"
Kael’s fingers danced across his portable tactical console with blinding speed. Holographic windows flashed amber, green, and red as terabytes of encrypted data flooded his screen.
"Sir, I’m trying! They’ve got multi-layered proxy servers routed through three different continents—Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, and a secure offshore server farm right here in the bay!" Kael shouted over the clacking of keys. "It’s a moving-target firewall! Every time I break a layer, they shift the IP address!"
"Find it!" Vincent commanded, his voice carrying the absolute authority of a man pushing past the brink of sanity. "If anything happens to my daughter, I will burn every server farm they own to ash!"
"Got it!" Kael yelled triumphantly, slamming his palm onto the enter key. "Found the physical routing node! It’s physically located inside an abandoned subterranean water treatment facility just two miles north of here—the exact same facility the Thornes used as their secondary communications hub!"
Vincent didn't hesitate for a single second. He sprinted toward the command van, throwing open the door.
"Kael, stay here and secure the prisoners. Take two strike teams and meet me at the water treatment facility in five minutes. I’m going in first."
"Sir, wait! It's a suicide mission! They'll have automated defenses—"
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"Let them try," Vincent snarled, slamming the driver's side door shut.
The heavy-duty Moretti command SUV roared to life, tires screeching against the asphalt as it rocketed out of the dockyard into the rainy night, leaving a trail of burning rubber in its wake.
